During the TechEd 2014 conference in Houston, Microsoft announced several new features for its cloud productivity suite. The most interesting is called the Office Graph and it is a service that allows users to highlight the relationships between people and information.

Office Graph operation is similar to that of Facebook or other social networks, but in this case the concept of the social graph is applied to the working world. The first application that uses Office Graph is called Oslo, the machine learning integration in Office.

In combination with Oslo, Office Graph records the relationships between people and information, via e-mail, conversations, documents, sites, instant messages, meetings, and other content, thereby creating a true social business. Office Graph combines the power of social networks, cloud, big data and machine learning in a single product.

Users will see the information in the form of cards and will be able to immediately check the authors of the various actions (who edited a document, who has shared, who made ​​a presentation, etc.). For each person, Oslo will show different data, including precisely working relationships with colleagues. For example, when users login to the app, they will be presented with a personalized view of recent Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents that have been shared with them via contacts, which they can then comment and work collaboratively on.

“Basically we look at Office 365, we look at those workloads, and we start to look at your interactions between content, information, and other people,” explained Cem Aykan, Microsoft’s product manager for enterprise search. “What we do is, we take all that content and all those signals, user behavior… and then by applying machine learning principles right on top, we start to map these relationships.”

Oslo and Office Graph combine to create a kind of personalized search engine–one that searches not only based on keywords, but learns about the user, so it can look more intelligent to find the most appropriate information. Functionally, Oslo works same way as Siri and Google Now, but the trend is towards the tools that are not just store and search data, but intelligent and proactively manage information.

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